Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

about.gitlab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 750 posts

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#241

Post by xdennis »

PradeetPatel wrote: post #110
Animats wrote: post #17

Their old CREDIT values: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency. New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes. In other words, work harder, not smarter, and no more DEI.

There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength. Does anyone know what caused this?

> There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength.

Okay, I'll bite. Why is it a strength, and why is it the greatest strength?

All people are equal, so it shouldn't matter if you have an all Asian team, an all black team, or any mix of all races.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#242

Post by OhMeadhbh »

How many people are at GitHub these days? I interviewed there just less than a decade ago and they REALLY did not like me. I kept yammering on about ensuring your KPIs are correct and making sure people felt psychologically safe. I think this was just after they were nabbed my MSFT and it felt like they were panicking, trying to figure out what would become of them now that they had been swallowed by a whale.

I've done some organizational consulting in the past, often trying to help companies understand why their employees don't trust management. I suspect the powers that be thought that post was decent, and I think the GitHub survivors will likely ignore most of it. And I don't know anything about what's going on there. But if you told me GitHub employees were made MORE nervous by that post than LESS, I would not be surprised.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#243

Post by andy_ppp »

vkou wrote: post #238
andy_ppp wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To build good software you need to think for yourself rather than aimlessly making a pastiche, derivative work never produces good art.

To build good software you need to take the time to make your existing features work well, and improve or prune the ones that don't. In other words, it is craftsmanship . The American corporation and its values are anathema to craftsmanship. You can ******* a **** all you want, it's never going to turn into gold, but your hands will be covered in crud.

I think we are describing the same set of issues with different emphases.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#244

Post by CGamesPlay »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #242

How many people are at GitHub these days? I interviewed there just less than a decade ago and they REALLY did not like me. I kept yammering on about ensuring your KPIs are correct and making sure people felt psychologically safe. I think this was just after they were nabbed my MSFT and it felt like they were panicking, trying to figure out what would become of them now that they had been swallowed by a whale. I've do…

How do you think the GitLab employees felt about it?

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#245

Post by sgarland »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #242

How many people are at GitHub these days? I interviewed there just less than a decade ago and they REALLY did not like me. I kept yammering on about ensuring your KPIs are correct and making sure people felt psychologically safe. I think this was just after they were nabbed my MSFT and it felt like they were panicking, trying to figure out what would become of them now that they had been swallowed by a whale. I've do…

…this is GitLab, not GitHub.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#246

Post by OhMeadhbh »

Animats wrote: post #17

Their old CREDIT values: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency. New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes. In other words, work harder, not smarter, and no more DEI.

I'm not even sure it even means "work harder, not smarder and wach yor seplling." In my experience it's more of a shibboleth to the new masters to let them know they're down with creating a top-down organization where information flows only one way.

Were I to have crafted this post, it would have included things like

"We ask our employees, customers and investors time to prove ourselves to you again as we re-commit to listening to our stake-holders and ensure our organization is properly re-positioned to execute our continued plans to deliver the best possible service..."

But instead it comes across as "someone read an article about Amazon's two-pizza team rule and we figured there were worse things to try."

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#247

Post by threecheese »

Am I alone in being extremely sensitive to LLM-style writing, observing it in this article, and feeling a little upset about that? The letter to employees ticks several of the boxes, and if I’m not wrong that’s kinda shitty. Or perfectly aligned with the spirit of the announcement (or both).

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#248

Post by smhaziq »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #242

How many people are at GitHub these days? I interviewed there just less than a decade ago and they REALLY did not like me. I kept yammering on about ensuring your KPIs are correct and making sure people felt psychologically safe. I think this was just after they were nabbed my MSFT and it felt like they were panicking, trying to figure out what would become of them now that they had been swallowed by a whale. I've do…

I think you might have GitHub and GitLab mixed up.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#249

Post by sgarland »

> Great engineers are problem solvers and builders who care about system design, distributed systems, reasoning through failures, safely integrating new capability into critical systems, and making decisions under ambiguity.

Yes, and the people who are all-in on agentic AI are, in practically every example I’ve seen, not that. They’re the jackasses giving Claude root access to their prod DB and then writing a blog post about how much they’ve learned from their mistake.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#250

Post by dunder_cat »

After CVE-2023-7028 (account takeover via password reset, IIRC you just had to add a semi-colon between the correct email and the attacker email and it'd email both) was exploited against my cluster, the boasting about fully-automated changes and reviews scares me. I hope I'm far from the only one that hasn't forgotten issues like this.

I'm aware that the defective code was not written by AI but nonetheless, GitLab is what stands between many small organizations and their most precious resources. I was fortunate that 2FA stopped the damage, but what's going to happen the next time? What if my organization is permanently damaged because we taught the machines to go fast and break things, too [1]?

[1] VPN is an option but we're a non-profit with a number of non-technical users, so admittedly we're caught in a balance between making it harder to do things. As much as WireGuard is awesome, there's still a barrier.

Post reply on HN